The Kabuliwala is back!

The character created by Rabindranath Tagore has got a new back-story and a Taliban twist in a contemporary re-telling which is part of a newly launched initiative.

Producer and founder of a newly-launched initiative, Sunil Doshi is collaborating with filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, actress Sharmila Tagore, French screenplay writer Jean Claude Carriere and ad filmmaker-lyricist Piyush Pandey to reinvent and reinterpret long and short stories for cinema, television, mobile and online platforms. These stories can be from a book, blog, film or even a newspaper article.

Eightytwo-year old Carriere who adapted Peter Brook's play The Mahabharata for a 1989 film of the same name, is working on Rabindranath Tagore’s iconic short story Kabuliwala for the screen. “If we can rework Shakespeare, why can’t we contemporise Tagore?” argues Doshi, pointing out that they have given Kabuliwala a new back-story and purpose.

This character is a theatre owner and film lover from Kabul whose livelihood is destroyed by the Taliban and his wife and daughter killed.

“He’s smuggled into Kolkata by an Afghan woman who’s into burqa boxing and he goes from house to house with his bioscope showing children films, which is how he meets his Mini. We’re targeting a 2015 release for our film,” says Doshi.

His team of writers is also working on other ideas. In the works are Hindi adaptations of a Thai film, Headshot, a Korean film, Crying Fist and another film called Three Star Bhangra Boys. While Crying Fist, a 2005 South Korean film, is about two men who take to boxing to turn around lives gone astray, Headshot is a 2011 thriller which was Thailand’s entry for the 85th Academy Awards in the Foreign Language category. It is about a cop struck in the head by a bullet who now sees the world upside down.

Three Star Bhangra is worlds away from the grit of the former two stories and traces the journey of a girl from Amritsar who gets the chance to go to London and jam with the Bhangra Boys after coming second in a reality contest.

“And there she finds out that the boys are 50-year-old musicians but one has a 24-year-old son and there begins a journey of music, love and family,” says Doshi. “If Q and A could be adapted into the Oscar winning Slumdog Millionare, why not such stories?,” he maintains.